Covert support of violence will return to haunt us

Covert support of violence will return to haunt us

Unless we hold our government to account for murderous foreign
policy, the innocent will continue to pay the price

Mark Curtis

As bloodshed mounts each day in Iraq, what prospect is there that British ministers will be held accountable for the illegal invasion and occupation that triggered this carnage? If past precedents are anything to go by, not much. But the likelihood is that, as in London earlier this summer, it will be we who pay the price for that failure to hold our leaders to account.

This week is the 40th anniversary of one of the postwar world's worst bloodbaths, which took place in Indonesia. Yet British ministers and officials in the then Labour government have never been held accountable for the covert role they played, along with the US, in supporting this slaughter - and the 30-year dictatorship of General Suharto it brought to power. The long-term blowback from that support was felt only last weekend in the bomb attacks on the Indonesian island of Bali, carried out by militant Islamist groups nurtured for years by Suharto and the Indonesian military.

In early October 1965, a group of army officers in Indonesia led by Suharto took advantage of political instability to launch a terror campaign against the powerful Indonesian Communist party (PKI). Much of the killing was carried out by Islamist-led mobs promoted by the military to counter communist and democratic forces. Within a few months, nearly a million people lay dead, while Suharto removed President Ahmed Sukarno and emerged as ruler of a brutal regime that lasted until 1998.

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The Wilson government described the campaign as a "reign of terror", while information landed on its desks about hundreds of thousands of deaths. Yet propaganda operations were authorised from the MI6 base in Singapore, which planted fabricated stories about arms shipments from China in the international media. The purpose, one intelligence officer wrote, was to "blacken the PKI in the eyes of the army and the people of Indonesia". "The impact has been considerable," one official noted. Denis Healey, defence secretary at the time, makes no mention of this British role in his 660-page memoirs.

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1585802,00.html